An encounter with the Incans

Ollataytambo welcomed us at night. After checking in at our hotel, I decided to go for a short stroll. The cool mountain air was refreshing, but I wore a flannel. Some wispy clouds streaked the sky, reflecting light from the waning half-moon that was peeking out from behind the dark silhouette of a nearby mountain. This village did not have the yellow aura that hovers over Lima; it was truly nighttime and, for the first time since arriving in Peru, darkness illuminated the stars and the Milky Way before my eyes, arching overhead across the valley.
I did not recognize many of the patterns that flickered above me, and the unfaltering Polaris was below the horizon. The Incans revered the Southern Cross, a constellation prominent from April through June, and called it Chakana, a name with roots in the indigenous language of Quechua. Chakana is also the name of a symbol highly idolized in Incan times, often referred to as the Incan Cross. The reverence for celestial bodies and formations among the ancient cultures of Peru was not without reason.
The sun, moon and stars worked as cyclic clocks for those ancient people. Based on the locations of the stars and using familiar grooves and shapes in the mountainsides to judge the exact position of the sunrise, the agriculturally-based society could determine the different seasons in order to begin planting or harvesting. Less utile to me in this modern age, the sky overhead only served to remind me how much there is still unknown and left to be experienced in life. I said goodnight to the stars and set my alarm for 5 a.m. in order to wake up and greet the sun.
At dawn I was hiking up a path that switch-backed across the western face of the nearest mountain. With the altitude, my breath quickly became heavy and my heart pounded harder than usual, but I was in no rush. Taking slow steps allowed me to take in my surroundings, listening to the birds that were my company and looking down at the village below, still not yet awake.
Across a narrow valley were Incan ruins on the hillside, where they had built terraces for their agriculture. It was a smart place to put them because, as the morning progressed, the plants on the eastern slope of that hill would receive plenty of sunlight. As the sun rose higher into the sky, the mountains around me were awoken out of their shadowy slumber, and in the town below I began to hear the noises of farm animals and the barking of dogs in the distance. I finally made it as far up as I could.
It was another old Incan site, made out of similar stones as the one across the valley, but this was a storage house. I was climbing the western slope of the mountain and it would stay cool and in the shade for much longer than anywhere else in the valley. There were no refrigerators or coolers back then, so the Incans built large buildings on the side of a steep mountain, both for protection and preservation of their valuable foods. I sat and listened as the town began to wake up, and I descended.
The people I encountered on the way back to the hotel were some of the friendliest I've met. Families inside of their homes eating breakfast with the door open, yelling out to me as I walk by telling me good morning. Children running and elderly people walking along the streets, but everybody said hello. The village was a true community. The narrow cobblestone roads were not fit for cars, so in the residential area everybody walked and talked face to face. I wandered those streets, looking at the construction of the adobe houses, and the walls protecting small yards, whose only security mechanisms were cacti and broken glass bottles planted into the dirt all along the top of each family's wall. Family and community were clearly very important to these villagers, and I meandered to the central plaza and the nearest paved road.
We boarded a bus that afternoon, taking us to the Piscacucho train station, a station that didn't exist a month ago. It was built because the tracks leading straight from Ollataytambo had still not been repaired from flood damage.  At approximately 6 p.m. Friday evening, we were on our way to Machu Picchu. I stared out the window until the darkness hid the shapes of the mountains, and then I slept, waiting to arrive at our next destination.